The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) maintains a set of code lists – including the Creditor Reporting System (CRS) – used by donors to report on their aid flows. These are used as part of donors’ DAC reporting, but also in their IATI publications. Not only that, but since some of the codes e.g. aid classification, are so widely used, they are also useful to recipient country governments to map aid activities to their own budgets. So they’re super important!

Keeping in sync

Now, these code lists are available on the OECD website as a non-machine-readable XLS file. There’s also an XML version, but it was last updated 18-months ago, and as such it differs significantly from the standard, canonical XLS version on the OECD website.

There has been a-rumbling (and some grumbling!) within the IATI community about getting the DAC to produce a machine-readable version of these code lists. This idea has long been in the offing, and we at Publish What You Fund would very much welcome such a development.